American Individualism: How a New Generation of Conservatives Can Save the Republican Party

221 Pages·2011·1.18 MB·English

by  Margaret Hoover

Copyright © 2011 by Margaret Hoover All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Forum, an imprint of the
Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN FORUM with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hoover, Margaret.
American individualism : how a new generation of conservatives can save the Republican Party/
Margaret Hoover.
p. cm.
1. Republican Party (U.S.: 1854– ) 2. Conservatism—United States.
3. Generation Y—United States. I. Title.
JK2356.H66 2011
324.2734—dc22 2011008362
eISBN: 978-0-30771817-4
Jacket design by Jean Traina
Jacket photograph by Deborah Feingold
v3.1
For my husband, John Avlon,
the love of my life
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
1. Growing Up Hoover
2. Conservative Tribalism
3. Meet the Millennials
4. Generational Theft
5. Freedom Means Freedom for Everyone
6. Education Reform: A Civil Rights Win for the Millennial
Generation
7. A New Republican Feminism
8. The Choice Dilemma
9. Conservative Environmentalism
10. A Nation of Immigrants, a Nation of Borders
11. Islamist Supremacy: A Millennial’s Worst Nightmare
12. America the Exceptional
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
This book has its origins in a lightning-strike moment I experienced
during the presidential campaign of 2004. At the time I was just another
bubbly young junior staffer, still savoring my good fortune at having
secured a position with the Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection campaign. I
bounded through the halls of the redbrick office building in Arlington,
Virginia, that housed President George W. Bush’s campaign
headquarters. After a morning staff meeting, I decided to swing by my
office-mate’s desk, tucked in a corner facing south toward the Potomac
River, with a clear view of Georgetown and the rest of Washington, D.C.
She was a coordinator in the political department, and that morning she
seemed troubled.
“Look,” she said, pointing to supporting documents that spelled out
what became known as the anti-same-sex-marriage strategy.
The regional political directors of President Bush’s campaign had been
tasked with ensuring that battleground states sponsored ballot initiatives
defining marriage exclusively as a union of one man and one woman,
thus prohibiting same-sex marriage. As an additional measure to boost
political enthusiasm, President Bush would ask Congress to pass an
amendment to the Constitution that would federally define all marriages
as being between a man and a woman. President Bush’s plan was to
campaign in these battleground states in support of the Federal Marriage
Amendment, in a joint effort with statewide candidates to energize social
conservatives, who, it was feared, might otherwise not come out to vote.
While they were in the voting booth casting a ballot against same-sex
marriage, the thinking went, they would also pull the lever for candidate
George W. Bush, the man for whom I worked.
That moment remains vivid in my memory. After an instant of
confusion, I felt a wave of disappointment crash over me. A series of
questions raced through my mind: Why on earth did the campaign care
about defining marriage as being between a man and a woman? Did
President Bush really believe it was important to make laws that
discriminate against gays and lesbians? Was this strategy necessary to
ensure the president’s reelection? Did President Bush think that
mobilizing people against gay rights was a good thing? I looked up from
the papers on my office-mate’s desk and stared out through the window
over the treetops toward the nation’s capital, feeling sick to my stomach.
That was my Ms.-Hoover-Goes-to-Washington moment. I suddenly
realized as never before that the Republican Party—my party—was
falling seriously out of step with a rising generation of Americans. These
up-and-coming young voters value the ideal of individual freedom when
it comes to gay rights, as they value some degree of reproductive
freedom. And they do not support conservative activists’ hard-line
positions on immigration and environmentalism. It was on these
questions, I felt, that the Republican Party was turning young voters
away. In the years since 2004, the problem has only worsened. Unless
the party can connect with a younger generation and, at the same time,
offer solutions to meet the challenges of modern America, it is destined
to remain at best a minority party—or worse, to fade into irrelevance.
That would be tragic, because a modern brand of American conservatism
is more urgently needed now than ever before.
Today, the United States faces a daunting array of challenges that
threaten to imperil the American dream. Skyrocketing deficits and debt
that amount to generational theft are staking a claim to the future
prosperity of the youngest Americans. Our economy has lost its vibrancy,
a quality that is increasingly associated with our less democratic trading
partners in foreign markets. America’s status as a world leader has
diminished at a time when the world’s most volatile region, the Middle
East, is in a state of upheaval and the threat of Islamic supremacy looms.
A failure to reconcile our twin needs for secure borders and new
immigrants has led us into a protracted and divisive immigration crisis.
Our schools, rather than facilitating equality of opportunity, increasingly
constrict the upward mobility of young people. America’s challenges all
have one thing in common: They will likely be with us for a long time,
and the next generation of Americans will have to solve them, or face
American decline.
I believe that the next generation of Americans—the first to come of
age in the new millennium—understands our situation well. The
“millennials,” born roughly between the years 1980 and 1999, perceive
our political system at an impasse. They fear that as a nation we are
incapable of addressing our problems. From every corner, they hear
exhausted ideological rhetoric and see political gamesmanship at the
expense of practical solutions.
Millennials thought they had found a candidate to break through the
rhetorical divisions and excuses for inaction when they voted
overwhelmingly for Barack Obama in 2008. They believed they were
electing a man who, as he had promised, would bring change to
Washington. His rhetoric spoke to their desire to move beyond the
partisan divide of red states and blue states, to unify the country in order
to solve problems. They have been disappointed.
As a result, millennials have yet to solidly commit to a political party.
As a group, they are confident, open to change, globally oriented,
techno-savvy, hyperconnected, and 50 million strong. By political
orientation, the largest bloc are Independents, followed by Democrats,
with Republicans a distant third. Though likely to call themselves
liberal, millennials are not proponents of the big-government orthodoxy
of modern liberalism. And yet, they are socially liberal, adhering to the
least traditional views of family, homosexuality, and gender roles. In this
sense, they are passionate about expanding individual freedom. They
also have idealistic expectations about what government can and should
do, and are optimistic about the competence of their elected leaders.
Yet the millennials also demonstrate decidedly conservative
tendencies, even though relatively few call themselves Republicans.
They show signs of fiscal conservatism and cherish individual freedom,
self-expression, and the ability to choose their own way in life. They
have favorable attitudes toward business and individual
entrepreneurship and are less likely than their parents to say that the
government should take on more debt in order to help those in need.
Some might call them “fiscally conservative but socially liberal.” They
are ripe for a political party to come along and make the case for
maximum freedom, fiscal responsibility, equality of opportunity, social
mobility, individual responsibility, and service to community and
country. They are likely to frustrate the ambitions of old-line political
purists, because they do not fit neatly into the traditional partisan or
ideological boxes.
Neither party, in my view, has secured a connection with millennial
sensibilities. While Barack Obama succeeded in appealing to them in the
2008 election campaign, his party failed to do so during the 2010
midterms. Republicans, meanwhile, have never managed to connect. Nor
have they seriously tried. That’s the purpose of this book: to make the
case to millennials that they should give the Republican Party a fair
hearing and to make the case to my fellow Republicans that millennials
are not a lost cause.
Republicans have generated some of the best ideas for tackling the
most pressing problems facing millennials—the debt and the deficit,
education reform, immigration reform, market-based health-care reform,
and practical approaches to environmental conservation. And when it
comes to protecting individual freedom, the Republican Party has always
prided itself on taking the lead.
But let’s face facts: The Republican Party’s brand is damaged. The
perception that the Religious Right and social conservatives dominate the
party apparatus is part of what has caused millennials to tune us out.
Increasingly disconcerted by this widening gap between the perception
of the Republican Party and the expectations of millennials, I undertook
a journey in search of a fresh way for my party to appeal to the
millennial generation.
I arrived at my destination with the help of an unexpected source: the
writings of my great-grandfather, President Herbert Hoover, the thirty-
first president of the United States. Growing up a Hoover, I had plenty of
insults thrown my way simply on account of my family name. When
you’re related to one of the great mythical villains of American political
history, you grow up constantly on the defensive. My friends’ parents,
my teachers in grade school and high school, my professors in college—
they all pilloried my great-grandfather’s presidency, indeed his entire
career, as a failure of the highest order.
I won’t say that this didn’t cost a few tears or leave me without
emotional scars, but being a direct descendant of Herbert Hoover has
given me a special connection to an extraordinary individual. I never
met my great-grandfather, but through family stories and my own
exploration of the historical record, I learned about his orphan
childhood, his success as a mining engineer, his globe-trotting years in
business as a self-made millionaire before the age of forty, and his
unprecedented achievement in building up nongovernmental
organizations. Herbert Hoover was responsible for saving more lives
from hunger and disease than anyone who has ever lived. His career as
the most effective secretary of commerce in our nation’s history and his
efforts to build a public-private coalition to provide power to the
nation’s western states led to one of the most successful infrastructure
projects in history: the Hoover Dam.
Herbert Hoover was millennial in spirit long before the term came into
existence. He was like the Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg of his day—an
innovator who believed in practical solutions, who dedicated his
material and intellectual wealth to the service of the world, who
believed in a philosophy encapsulated in the title of a little book he
published, “American Individualism.”*
I discovered this modest work, published in 1922, and was struck by
its immediacy. It seemed it could have been written just yesterday, so
contemporary were its themes. Largely overlooked by historians who
hold forth on my great-grandfather’s presidency, it is a powerful
document: a broad and forceful statement of political philosophy and an
extended essay on the relationship between the individual and the state.
What I found most extraordinary was the relevance of its message and
how it made the case for modern conservative thinking in an original
way. Its author never refers to himself as a “conservative,” yet he offers
a compelling explanation for the vital importance of limited but energetic
government in America’s democratic system. His book celebrates
America’s diversity of religious traditions and heritages. It emphasizes
the individual’s responsibility to serve his or her community. It presents
what modern-day conservatives would appreciate as a fundamentally
individual-centered view of society, and it defends that view in a
refreshing and convincing manner. The influential American historian
Frederick Jackson Turner said it “contains the New and Old Testament
of the American gospel.”
That earlier booklet inspired me to write this book. This is a moment
when modern conservatism needs to be fresh and convincing. It has
lately become deeply nostalgic for the Reagan years, which makes sense,
as Reagan was the last conservative leader to enjoy broad political
support. He was also the last leader to unite the various tribes of the
conservative nation—the neocons, paleocons, social conservatives, fiscal